Following up on the previous post, Andrew Sullivan has a piece in New York Magazine that ought to be cautionary to Republicans, especially those in Congress. Brexit passed in the UK by a 52 to 48% margin in a low turn out election. Donald Trump lost the popular vote 46 to 48% in a low turn out election and only won the presidency because the Electors of the Electoral College refused to do their duty and vote against a dangerous, malignant, narcissistic demagogue. As Theresa May found out on Thursday, when the real majority does get out to vote, things can change drastically. For Republicans, especially amoral sleaze bags like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell need to grasp is that they have ZERO mandate. Trump/Pence has no mandate despite the lies and braggadocio of Der Trumpenführer. The true majority of Americans - which excludes evangelical Christians who have become a malignant cancer just as dangerous as Trump - needs to mobilize and make it clear that our response to Trump's and the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda and bows to theocrats is a resounding "No!" As Sullivan lays out, Trump is worthy of impeachment. The British have shown us that we can re-correct the course of America. To do so, Trump and the GOP must be defeated and thrown out of office. We can start by electing Democrats in November, 2017, in Virginia and New Jersey. Come, November, 2018, the Republicans need to suffer a bloodbath defeat. Here are highlights from Sullivan's column:

Just a few months ago, it’s worth remembering, we seemed to be
careening to a new and possibly long-lived right-populist era in Anglo-American
politics. In the U.S., Donald Trump had stunned the world and his own party
Establishment by seizing the nomination of the GOP, and then defeating the
overwhelming favorite, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidency. In Britain, a
referendum on Brexit had shocked and overturned the British and European
Establishments, and dispatched Prime Minister David Cameron to the bucolic
shires whence he came.

The uninspiring but dogged Theresa May emerged as Cameron’s
successor, after her Tory male rivals had out-machoed and out-plotted each
other into mutual destruction. And both Trump and May seemed to have captured a
restless, rightist mood in the American and British publics, as Reagan and
Thatcher had before them. Trump had endorsed Brexit and May, in turn, had been
the first foreign visitor to the White House, desperate for a new U.S.-U.K.
trade deal. Although many of us believed that Brexit was understandable but
irrational and that Trump was a catastrophe just waiting to unfold, the people
of the two countries begged to differ.

Except
they didn’t entirely, did they? Trump, it’s always worth recalling, lost the
popular vote 46–48 percent. Brexit passed only narrowly, 52–48 percent. Both
countries, despite the top-line results, remained deeply divided — riven by the
cleavages of globalization and its discontents. And now, it’s clear, the
divisions have not evaporated and the opposition has revived, with increasingly
robust energy.

This week, Trump slumped to the lowest approval ratings
of his term — in the upper-to-mid-30s — while being called a liar by the former
head of the FBI. And May was humiliated — there is no other word for it — by
the British voters in a snap election. In the wake of Brexit and Trump, the
forces of reaction in Europe have also seemed to recede. The far right gained
but didn’t triumph in the Netherlands; Le Pen, while winning a historic level
of support, faded in the home stretch. And now the British have actually made
it conceivable that Jeremy Corbyn — the most left-wing leader in the history of
the Labour Party, a sympathizer with Hamas and the IRA, and an old-school
“unelectable” hard-line socialist — could be prime minister in the not-so-distant
future.There
were some specific American parallels to May’s defeat that are worth noting.
She ran an Establishment campaign shockingly like Hillary Clinton’s in an era
when populism can swing in all sorts of unlikely directions. She began with the
presumption that she would coast to victory because her opponent was simply
unelectable, extremist, and obviously deplorable in every way. She decided to
run a campaign about her, rather than about the country. She kept her public
appearances to small, controlled settings, while Corbyn drew increasingly large
crowds at outdoor rallies. She robotically repeated her core argument that she
represented “strong, stable leadership,” with little else to motivate or
inspire voters. She chose to run solely on Brexit — and the hardest of Brexits
on offer — while Labour unveiled a whole set of big-spending, big-borrowing,
big-government policies that drew a million new younger voters to the polls.And on the critical issue of Brexit, she underestimated the ambivalence
in the country as a whole. She mistook 52 percent for a national consensus. In
London and the Southeast in particular, those who voted Remain in the
referendum — or who intended to but didn’t — came out in force to oppose a hard
Brexit. The millennials actually turned up this time. In a student town like Cambridge, for example, the Labour majority
went from 599 to more than 12,000 — a staggering leap. Labour, moreover, shrewdly
didn’t run to reverse Brexit, and were thereby able to siphon off some
pro-Brexit working-class voters from the swiftly collapsing UKIP.

What all this means now that Article 50 has been triggered
to kick off the Brexit process is anyone’s guess. But among those celebrating
last night were surely Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and the EU elite. This
could put Brexit back in play, and certainly destroys May’s credibility in the
looming negotiations. It’s therefore a near certainty now that she will be gone
in short order.

A possible replacement: the young lesbian leader of the Tories in
Scotland, Ruth Davidson, whose success north of the border may well have kept
the Tories from an even worse result. And that, indeed, was another surprise:
the parties in Scotland that favor keeping the union with England won twice as
many votes as the Scottish Nationalist Party. This was a vote for keeping the
entire country together and for less of a rush to get out of the EU (and even
perhaps a second referendum). It was a populist wave … for the recent past.

The populism we’ve seen bolster the right, in other words,
is a fickle beast. . . . . But what it has been able to do is to tip Britain
into an unexpected political impasse, to give it a parliament where the Tories
will not be able to sustain a reliably pro-Brexit majority for very long, and
to make it all but certain that another election will at some point have to be
called, possibly in the fall. What the result of that will be is something I
will not safely predict until the morning after — except that Corbyn will be
running, and May won’t.

And there was a lovely resonance, don’t you think, that this shocking
reversal for right-populism came on the very same day that President Trump was
definitively shown to be more than worthy of impeachment. I’ve long been a
skeptic of some of the darkest claims about his campaign’s alleged involvement
with the Russian government — and possible evidence thereof — but I’m not
skeptical at all of the idea that he has clearly committed a categorical abuse
of his presidential power in his attempt to cover it up.

This sobering reality was not advanced by the Comey
hearings yesterday, riveting though they were. We have long known that Trump
colluded with the Russian government to tilt the election against his opponent
— because he did so on national television during the campaign, urging the
Kremlin to release more hacked Clinton emails to help him win. We also know
that he fired FBI Director James Comey in order to remove the cloud of the Russian
investigation from his presidency — because Trump said so on national
television himself and then boasted about it to two close Putin lackeys in the
Oval Office!

What else do we really need to know?

Or look at it this way: We now have a witness of long
public service, clear integrity, with contemporaneous memoranda and witnesses,
who just testified under oath to the president’s clear attempt to obstruct
justice. Any other president of any party who had been found guilty of these
things would be impeached under any other circumstances. Lying under oath about
sexual misconduct is trivial in comparison. So, for that matter, is covering up
a domestic crime. Watergate did not, after all, involve covering up the attempt
of the Kremlin to undermine and corrode the very core of our democratic system
— free and fair elections.

[I]f this were a Democrat in power, almighty hell would have already
been unleashed. We wouldn’t be mulling impeachment. It would already be well
under way.

The “defenses” of the president are telling. . . . The
Speaker of the House then tried this one on: “The president’s new at this. He’s
new to government and so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running
protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI, and White Houses.
He’s just new to this.” Excuse me? Someone who assumes the office of the
presidency without knowing that we live under the rule of law, and who believes
that the president can rig the legal and investigative system to his own
benefit, has no business being president at all.

Imagine how many other functionaries, less established and far weaker
and less pliable than Comey, will acquiesce to abuse of this kind, if it is
ignored, enabled, or allowed to continue. . . . He [Trump]will say or do
anything — and yes, lie through his teeth repeatedly — to obscure the reality
in front of our eyes. But we need to be clear about something. If we let an
abuse of power of this magnitude go unchallenged, we have begun the formal task
of dismantling our system of government.

Do we Americans have sufficient integrity to do this, and to reverse
the drastic error we all so recently made? Maybe the British have just showed
us that, yes, we can.

During the 2016 presidential election - which had a pathetic overall voter turn out - many of America's young voters stayed home. The consequences for the country have been catastrophic. Something similar happened in the United Kingdom during the Brexit vote- young voters stayed home and older, racist and bigoted voters tipped the election in a way that shocked many young voters. On Thursday, they got their revenge and voted against pro-Brexit politicians and deprived the Conservative Party a majority in Parliament. One can only hope that young American voters will take a page from the vote in Britain and turn out in large numbers both in November, 2017, in Virginia and in November, 2018, and direct their wrath at Republicans. Staying home from the polls is never an acceptable option and for the young, it merely allows all too often greedy, aging bigots to sway the election outcome. There is a message too for Democrat candidates: they need to connect with young voters and make the case for policies that address their concerns. A piece in the New York Times looks at this past week's vote in the UK. Here are excerpts:

LONDON — As Britain took stock on Friday of the stunning results of a snap election
that wiped out the parliamentary majority of Prime Minister Theresa May and her
governing Conservative Party, one narrative bubbled up to the surface: The
youth had spoken.

The election results were fueled partly by a
higher turnout rate among young British voters who had long been angry at the
results of the referendum last year to leave the European Union, known as
Brexit. That vote, overwhelmingly supported by older Britons, was seen by many
younger people as a threat to their jobs, their ability to study abroad and
their desire to travel freely across the bloc’s borders.

In other words, the vote by young
Britons on Thursday had a whiff of payback.

“I was so angry about Brexit that I
buried my head in a pillow and screamed,” said Louise Traynor, 24, a waitress
in the southwestern district of Battersea in London, who had never voted before
Thursday.

Shaking her head in frustration, Ms.
Traynor said she had been angry at herself because she hadn’t bothered to vote
the first time around. “I was stupid enough to think that the country had some
sense,” she said.

The Brexit referendum, Ms. Traynor said, could lead to closed borders,
which threatened to tear her long-term Spanish boyfriend away from her, and her
away from the group of European friends she had made while working at a tapas
restaurant.

On
Friday morning, she said, much of the anxiety she had felt about her future was
replaced with excitement when she realized that her vote for the opposition Labour Party
had denied the prime minister a mandate.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour gained 31 seats, while Mrs. May’s party
lost 12 seats and its overall majority — leaving a hung Parliament, one in
which neither side has enough lawmakers for control. In a statement on Friday,
Mrs. May grimly announced that she would form a minority government with the
Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

Ms. Traynor said that Mr.
Corbyn’s campaign had “injected energy” into what otherwise seemed like a stale
election that would bring more “doom.”

“Does
Theresa May care that I’ve been on minimum wage for three years and I’m still
paying my student debt?” she asked. “No, she doesn’t. All she cares about is
Brexit and getting her deal.”Many
young Britons felt compelled to vote after the Brexit decision, because of
austerity budgets and what they saw as the establishment’s tendency to serve
the interests of the rich. This year saw a spike in young people registering to
vote — more than one million people under 25 applied.The
turnout in constituencies with younger voters rose
significantly, appearing to benefit Labour. The turnout for 18- to 24-year-olds
was 66.4 percent, according to Sky News data. Other reports
put it as high as 72 percent. In the 2015 general election, the rate for voters
of the same age range was 43 percent, according to Ipsod, a
marketing and opinion research company.

The payoff was evident in Battersea, where Labour seized the
Conservative seat.

“Representatives from the
Labour Party knocked on our doors and gathered us in groups, asking us about
our problems and talking to us about solutions,” said Jessie Cox, a 21-year-old
student. “They gave us a reason to vote.”

Jennifer Hudson, a senior
lecturer in politics at University College London, said the effectiveness of
Mr. Corbyn’s campaign could be seen in a picture of him with young supporters,
cheek to cheek.

“I thought: ‘We will never
see Theresa May like that with her supporters,’” Ms. Hudson said. “He has
managed to create a human connection with his voters.”

“We may still be far from the final result that we wanted, but this
feels like progress, and hopefully, it gives out a message to the pompous
Tories that they can’t make bad decisions on our behalf,” said Luke Rossi, 25,
a musician who had voted for the first time.

In Battersea Park, students
ages 19 to 21 were debating possible political outcomes of the election
aftermath. All said they hoped Mrs. May would be removed as leader of her
party.

“She’s an embarrassment to
the country,” said Fiona Barry, 20, a student at Queen Mary University in
London. “England deserves so much better than that.”

Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and and Paul Ryan are all an embarrassment to America. Even more so than the Tories, Republicans have nothing to offer to young Americans given the GOP's sole desire being to give enormous tax cuts to the wealth while slashing benefits and the social safety net that aids everyone else. I hope young voters wake up to this reality and get out and vote in their own interest. It's a virtual guaranty that aging whites - and evangelical Christians - do not give a damn about the long term future of the country or economic opportunity for all.

One of the things that I have enjoyed through my blog - and opportunities it has opened - and my activism is meeting wonderful people. Be it my network of LGBT blogger friends who I first met in December 2008 at a Mircosoft/Progressive Insurance sponsored LGBT blogger summit in Washington, D.C., or friends that I have made through HRBOR, HR Pride, or friends first met through other activism, I have build an amazing circle of friends and activists who continue to work to create change for the better. Two of this group of people are Gavin Grimm and his mother Deirdre Grimm who I first met at an event in our home. The two have become true champions for equality for all Americans and had little idea of what they were going to experience when Gavin's saga began. Now, Deirdre has an op-ed in the Washington Post about the continuing efforts needed to move the clock forward. Here are highlights:

We teach our children to be kind. We teach them to love
and to live life to the fullest. We teach them countless things to help them
become better people, because as parents we all want the best for our children.
And we demand that these values be taught in our schools so that when our kids
graduate, they are open, compassionate people who understand that we all bleed
the same blood and that everyone deserves to be treated with equality, dignity
and respect.

My son, Gavin, will graduate from high school
on Saturday. But he did not get the opportunity to learn those values at
school. Instead, he learned them despite his school board treating him with the
opposite of those values.

By now, my son’s story has spread to
communities all across this country, because he stood up for himself as a
transgender boy who wanted only to fully participate in his high school. He
fought a policy that singled him out by forcing him to use a restroom separate
from his peers. That fight took him all the way to the Supreme Court. Along the
way, he helped people learn about the importance of treating transgender people
fairly and equally.

When Gavin came out as his true self, I honestly didn’t
even know what it meant to be transgender. I spent days and nights reading as
much as I could. I read a study that said some 50 percent of transgender
teenagershad seriously
considered suicide. That was all I needed to know.

As a parent, you are terrified for your
child’s safety. You expect there to be some tough times, especially in high
school, but you tend to imagine it coming from other students. You don’t expect
the parents to be the bullies.

These parents then attacked himat a public
meeting, humiliating him and our family in front of our community.
This led to the school board requiring Gavin to use a private restroom.

Some may think this was a reasonable
compromise, but this fails to appreciate how difficult such stigmatizing
treatment can be, even just on a practical level. My son faced being late to
class because he had to use a restroom on the other side of the building.

Unfortunately, just weeks before Gavin’s case
was to be heard,the Trump administration withdrewthe Obama administration guidance that
had clarified that Title IX protects trans kids. The Supreme Court sent Gavin’s
case back to the lower courts to be reargued in light of this new reality.

Make no mistake: Gavin’s fight is not over. We
are about to have the case reheard. No administration has the ability to change
the meaning of Title IX. I look forward to seeing the rights of my son and
other trans people recognized.

But the fact that we did not settle this while
Gavin was still in school will be like an asterisk on his graduation. He won’t
be able to remember his high school experience the way his classmates will, but
he doesn’t think about that. Instead, he thinks about all the trans kids still
out there who are being treated as less than everyone else. Gavin knows that
this fight is about much more than him, just as it is about much more than
restrooms. It’s about dignity and respect.

Gavin wasn’t looking to be on the front lines of a major
civil rights battle. But he had the courage to stand up — because he knew deep
down that it was right. His bravery has made all of us better and stronger
people. My kid is truly awesome.

This week, Gavin will cross the stage at his
high school graduation. I will undoubtedly feel the same emotions that mothers
throughout the country with graduating seniors will be feeling: pride, love,
excitement and so much more. But I am also inspired. I’m inspired by my son’s
unyielding courage and determination. And I’m so thankful for all those who
stand with Gavin as his fight — our fight — continues.

Kudos to both Gavin and his parents who have had his back throughout this saga. And shame on the parents - especially those who pretend to be "godly Christians" who have led the efforts to persecute Gavinn and other LGBT individuals.

Before Donald Trump won the presidency through a flaw in America's Electoral College system that ignored Trump's significant loss of the popular vote, we witnessed a campaign similar to that of Trump which emphasized xenophobia and bigotry in the United Kingdom for that nation's exit from the European Union. As in America, many British were shocked that the forces of hatred and isolation won the day in the BREXIT vote. Based on the results of yesterdays elections in the UK, perhaps many voters are having second thoughts. Prime
Minister Theresa May’s had called elections in what some see as remarkable gamble
on a snap election to increase her party's power.It backfired and now Conservatives no longer
hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons. As in America where urban areas oppose the Trump/GOP agenda, in the UK urban areas rejected the policies of the Conservatives and, by extension, Brexit. A piece in the New York Times looks at how the election results may put Brexit in danger. Here are highlights:

In a global economy amply stocked with anxiety-provoking variables,
Britain just added another.

An election designed to
bolster the government’s mandate instead yielded fundamental confusion over who
is in charge as the nation prepares for fraught negotiations in its pending
divorce from the European Union.

Prime Minister Theresa May
had called the election on the assumption that her Conservative Party would
emerge stronger, solidifying her negotiating position. Instead, the electorate’s stunning rebuke of her leadership
all but guarantees a period of unpredictable political jockeying, intensifying
uncertainty about future commercial dealings across the English Channel.

Investors took the latest
turmoil in Britain as a prompt to unload the British
pound. As European markets began trading on Friday, the currency
slipped about 2 percent against the dollar.

And yet the shocking electoral outcome also has the potential to
diminish the looming economic costs of Britain’s exit from the European Union,
commonly known as Brexit.

It enhanced the possibility that a chastened government led by Mrs.
May, or perhaps an administration led by someone else, would now strike a less
confrontational approach with Europe while seeking a way to keep Britain within
the bloc’s large single marketplace.

As
Britain prepared for its face-off with Europe, the prime minister had been
adamant that her country would impose strict limits on immigration, a posture
seemingly enhanced by recent terrorist attacks. Yet limiting immigration
appeared certain to cost Britain inclusion in the European single market, a
swath of the globe stretching from Ireland to Greece and holding some 500
million relatively affluent consumers.

The European authorities
have consistently emphasized that Britain’s continued inclusion in the single
market requires that it abide by the bloc’s rules — not least, a provision that
people be allowed to move freely within its confines.

This redrawing of the basic geography of European commerce was playing
out just as President Trump was disavowing regional trade deals across the
Atlantic and Pacific, while variously threatening trade hostilities with
Canada, China, Germany and Mexico.This
election could change that trajectory.

Whoever will be in charge —
a government led by a weakened Mrs. May, another member of her Conservative
Party, or a coalition spearheaded by the Labour Party — might well construe a
mandate to pursue a softer Brexit. The unexpected new political configuration might
compel Britain to relinquish its pursuit of immigration limits in an effort to
keep itself within the single market.

In short, the election has
complicated the assumption that Britain is headed irretrievably toward the
exits, producing a moment in which seemingly everything may be up for
reconsideration.

Those who have favored
Britain remaining within Europe, or at least softening the terms of its exit,
now have “an expectation, or at least a hope, that cooler heads will prevail,”
said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First, a company based in London
that manages foreign exchange transactions. “It may be that hard Brexit has
been rejected by the electorate.”

Worries about the economic impact of Brexit have been weighing heavily
on the pound, which plunged after the referendum last June that unleashed
Brexit. With Britain at risk of suffering barriers to trade, it has lost some
of its considerable luster as a place for companies to invest, making its money
a less desirable currency to hold.

A
weakened pound has, in turn, translated into rising prices in Britain — on
food, gasoline and imported components used by domestic factories. All of this
has reinforced concerns about the fate of the economy.

Would that America could hold a snap election. With Trumps approval levels at new lows, perhaps Americans could rid themselves of the foul and dangerous occupant of the White House. Meanwhile the Trump/GOP border tax could similarly impact prices in the USA and make goods more expensive for Trump's knuckle dragging supporters.

Given my work schedule and client demands, I was not able to watch all of James Comey's testimony today before members of the United States Senate. I did, however, get to hear portions of the testimony and various commentators' views. I even heard Paul Ryan's ridiculous attempt to excuse Trump's obstruction of justice efforts as the result of Trump "being inexperienced" in government. As readers know, I view Trump as a totally amoral person who operates in a manner akin to a Mafia don. Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He simply sees himself as above the rules and the law itself. Throw in his malignant narcissism and the result is a poisonous brew. True, Comey said that he told Trump that at the time of the conversations he was not personally the subject of an investigation. The operative part of Comey's statement was that at that time Trump was not under investigation. That has likely changed given Trump's firing of Comey and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor. A piece in Talking Points Memo sums up some of my thoughts. Here are excerpt:

One key takeaway
emerges in both the written statement and today’s Q&A: from close to the
beginning, Comey believed President Trump was untrustworthy, a bad actor. True
or not, that was there in really everything he said, every assumption, every
decision he describes making. One can certainly interpret his remarks to mean
that he thought Trump was a liar. (“I was honestly
concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it
important to document.“) This comes out just in the fullness of everything
Comey said: the immediate decision to start keeping detailed notes, the
entirety of the way he described the President, his descriptions of his own
reactions in the moment when dealing with the President. They all paint a
picture of Trump as dishonest, scheming and predatory. That is Comey’s take and
he went out of his way to make that clear. Perhaps the most noteworthy example
of this – though not the only one – was going into some depth about how he’d
never felt the need to make a contemporaneous record of his dealings with
either former President he’d dealt with – one Democrat and one Republican. We’d
heard that Comey is a consummate note taker, recording virtually every
consequential discussion he has. Apparently not. When it comes to meetings with
major political leaders and presidents, this was only for Trump.

Also highly notable was that
while Comey was clear and emphatic about President Trump not being personally a
target of the Russia probe, he also made clear – albeit implicitly – that he
believes that Trump is now being investigated for obstruction of justice.
That’s not hugely surprising, based on what we already knew. But it’s still a
very big deal. He marshaled strong evidence that he is correct. And we didn’t
know that before.

Also highly surprising was
that brief aside that suggested that there was some other problem we don’t know
about with Attorney General Sessions and Russia. Here’s the quotation: “We also were aware of facts that I can’t discuss
in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related
investigation problematic.”

I think it’s possible that this is a
reference to the then-unknown but subsequently reported additional meetings
with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. In that case, he’s only referring to things we
already know or know in their outlines from published reports. But that’s a
strained interpretation that is hard to square with the context. It sounds like
there’s something else that we don’t know about. That’s another big deal.

Less legally significant but
still consequential and highly revealing is Comey’s discussion of providing
copies of his memos or at least some of them to a friend, a law professor at
Columbia University with the express direction to surface them in the press. He
went further than this and made clear that he did this with the express intent
of forcing the appointment of a special counsel – something indeed happened.
This definitely reveals Comey as a skilled and unabashed bureaucratic and press
player. But we were naive if we didn’t know that already. Trump supporters will
clearly, indeed are seizing on this as discrediting any notion that Comey is
somehow pristine and above politics. Though Comey didn’t frame it that way,
it’s not unfair to see this as payback for his firing. But a close read of the
testimony suggests that Comey thought that his superiors at the Justice Department,
certainly Jeff Sessions and (I think he’s saying) Rod Rosenstein were
compromised. As I said earlier, I’m not sure it has to be either/or.

At the end of the day, I think
it all confirmed what we should know. Huge and far ranging cover-ups don’t
happen for no reason. Almost invariably they occur because of major wrongdoing.
It’s the cover-up not the crime – as I’ve said, that’s almost always wrong. You
cover up because you may get away with it and you can’t afford the crime to
become fully known. Usually cover-ups work, at least in part. What I think we
have here is some major wrongdoing, possibly of various different sorts. That
is matched by a President who acts as though the government is something like
his own possession, his own company. He acts like it. His lawyer talks like it.
Whatever the nature of the original bad acts – which I am assuming occurred
based on a lot of information but which we do not know with certainty – the
President has managed to stumble into a massive scandal with almost unbelievable
speed. As was really clear throughout the campaign, he is predatory, bad-acting
and impulsive and even self-destructive in a way that compounds and in some
respects makes less effective the underlying malignant behavior. He and his
lawyer are in way over their heads and will cause untold damage before this is
done, however it ends.

There are many who have stated that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, decided to withdraw America from the Paris climate accord for purely domestic political purposes: he has failed to deliver so far on any of his campaign promises and, therefore, was desperate to throw a political bone to his base of Christofascists and xenophobes. With his plans for health care reform - using the term "reform" very loosely - and an overhaul of the tax code going nowhere in Congress, trashing the Paris accord was the easiest way to convince his less than intellectually brilliant and non-analytical base a bone. Indeed, it is part and parcel with Trump's effort to construct a Potemkin village if you will for his base - for Fox News viewers, a "Potemkin village is is any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to
deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is - so that they will believe he is actually doing something for them as promised even when he is failing to do so in fact. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's failing policies and his efforts to continue to dupe the gullible in the GOP base. Here are excerpts:

It’s
“Infrastructure Week” at the White House. Theoretically.

On Monday, the
administration announced a plan to spend $200 billion on infrastructure and
overhaul U.S. air traffic control. There was a high-profile signing in the East
Wing before dozens of cheering lawmakers and industry titans. It was supposed
to be the beginning of a weeklong push to fix America’s roads, bridges, and
airports.

But in the next
two days, Trump spent more energy burning metaphorical bridges than trying to
build literal ones. He could have stayed on message for several hours, gathered
Democrats and Republicans to discuss a bipartisan agreement, and announced a
timeframe. Instead he quickly turned his attention to Twitter to accuse media
companies of “Fake
News” while undermining an alliance with Qatar based on what may be,
fittingly, a
fake news story.

It’s a microcosm
of this administration’s approach to public policy. A high-profile
announcement, coupled with an ambitious promise, subsumed by an unrelated,
self-inflicted public-relations crisis, followed by … nothing.

The secret of
the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like
there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health
care plan. More than 120 days into Trump’s term in a unified Republican
government, Trump’s policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction
category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The
president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of
federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most
significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.

The simplest
summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no
policy.

Consider the
purported focus of this week. An infrastructure plan ought to include actual
proposals, like revenue-and-spending details and timetables. The Trump
infrastructure plan has little
of that. Even the president’s speech
on Monday was devoid of specifics. . . . . The ceremonial signing on Monday was
pure theater. . . . Meanwhile, Congress
isn’t working on infrastructure at all, according to Politico,
and Republicans have shown
no interest in a $200 billion spending bill.

In short, this “plan” is not a plan,
so much as a Potemkin policy, a presentation devised to show the press and the
public that the president has an economic agenda. The show continued on
Wednesday, as the president delivered an infrastructure speech in Cincinnati
that criticized Obamacare, hailed his Middle East trip, and offered no new
details on how his plan would work. Infrastructure Week is a series of
scheduled performances to make it look as if the president is hard at work on a
domestic agenda that cannot move forward because it does not exist.

Journalists are
beginning to catch on. The
administration’s policy drought has so far been obscured by a formulaic
bait-and-switch strategy one could call the Two-Week Two-Step. Bloomberg
has compiled
several examples of the president promising major proposals or decisions on
everything from climate-change policy to infrastructure “in two weeks.” He has
missed the fortnight deadline almost every time.

The starkest
false promise has been taxes. . . . . . the simplest summary of White House tax
policy is: There is no plan. There isn’t even a complete staff to compose one.

The story is
slightly different for the White House budget, but no more favorable. The
budget suffers, not from a lack of details, but from a failure of numeracy that
speaks to the administration’s indifference toward serious public policy.

Trump and his
party are alike—united in their antagonism toward Obama-era policies and united
in their inability to articulate what should come next. Republicans are trapped
by campaign promises that they cannot fulfill. The White House is trapped
inside of the president’s perpetual campaign, a cavalcade of economic promises
divorced from any effort to detail, advocate, or enact major economic
legislation. With an administration that uses public policy as little more than
a photo op, get ready for many sequels to this summer’s Infrastructure Week.

The only good news is that since Trump's and the GOP's policies would likely be so bad for the country that it is a benefit that nothing is actually happening.

Today Daniel Coats refused to answer questions posed to him by Senators concerning possible requests or directives from Der Trumpenführer that he squelch the FBI investigation of Trump BFF Michael Flynn. The ruse for refusing to answer was that it was a public session and, therefore, Coats and others talked about their "feelings" and seemingly gave the various Senators the finger. Ditto for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who either (i) doesn't appreciate the seriousness of where the nation finds itself - he wasn't even 10 years old when Watergate unfolded- or (ii) has become complicit in the Trump obstruction of justice effort. Meanwhile, many Vichy Republicans, many of whom were adults during the Watergate scandal and at the time of Richard Nixon's resignation from the presidency, continue to close their eyes to the many sins and seemingly illegal acts of Der Trumpenführer. A column in the Washington Post by one of the Watergate prosecutors argues that James Comey's prepared statement released today provides sufficient evidence to launch an obstruction of justice case against Trump (and by extension his accomplices). Here are are column excerpts:

Inprepared testimonyreleased on the eve of his appearance
Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, former FBI director James B.
Comey placed President Trump in the gunsights of a federal criminal
investigation, laying out evidence sufficient for a case of obstruction of
justice.

Comey proved what Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and
National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers carefully avoided admitting
intheir testimony on Wednesday— that the
president had specifically attempted to shut off at least a major piece of what
Trump calls the “Russia thing,” the investigation into the misleading
statements by fired national security adviser Michael Flynn concerning his role
in dealings with the Russians. This kind of presidential intervention in a pending
criminal investigation has not been seen, to my knowledge, since the days of
Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Comey’s statement meticulously detailed a series of interventions by Trump
soliciting his assistance in getting the criminal probe dropped. These details
are red meat for a prosecutor. Presumably, the team of experienced criminal
prosecutors that special counselRobert S. Mueller IIIhas assembled will be following up on
this crucial testimony, which rests on contemporaneous memorandums that Comey
was sufficiently alarmed to prepare immediately after receiving the president’s
requests.

That both Coats and Rogers denied that they “felt pressured” provides
no comfort for the president’s position. The obstruction of justice statute
prohibits not only successful interference with pending criminal investigations
but also any use of “threats” to “endeavor” to obstruct an investigation. Thus,
it is the attempt or objective that is criminal, and Coats and Rogers were
apparently unable to deny that the president had solicited their interference
in the pending FBI investigation. If Coats and Rogers did not yield to the
endeavor, kudos for them, but that is no excuse for the president.

Moreover,
Comey’s testimony also supplies the element of “threats.” . . . The
president asked Comey whether he liked his job and wanted to continue in it,
. . . . Leaving little doubt about the price of continued retention, the president
twice, according to Comey, told him that he expected “loyalty” from Comey, just
as he did from everyone else around him.Then, on Feb.
14, the president carefully structured another one-on-one meeting with Comey,
specifically ordering Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to whom the FBI director
ordinarily reports, to leave the Oval Office where Comey, Sessions and other
national security officials (and Jared Kushner) had been meeting. At that
point, the president laid his cards on the table, according to Comey: “I hope
you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a
good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Next, in phone calls on March 30 and April 11, the president solicited
Comey’s help in removing the “cloud” over Trump resulting from the FBI
investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible Trump
campaign collusion. . . . . The
president dropped the other shoe onMay 9, summarily firing
Comey.

Comey’s statement lays out a case against the president that consists of a
tidy pattern, beginning with the demand for loyalty, the threat to terminate
Comey’s job, the repeated requests to turn off the investigation into Flynn and
the final infliction of career punishment for failing to succumb to the
president’s requests, all followed by the president’s own concession about his
motive. Any experienced prosecutor would see these facts as establishing a
prima facie case of obstruction of justice.

The ball now is
in Mueller’s court to decide whether he has (or will have) enough evidence to
charge Trump with obstruction and, if so, whether to reach the same conclusion
that I reached in the Nixon investigation — that, like everyone else in our
system, a president is accountable for committing a federal crime.

The author if the column? Philip Allen Lacovara, a former U.S. deputy
solicitor general in the Justice Department, who served as counsel to Watergate
special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski. I find Lacovara more believable than Trump apologists and Vichy Republicans.

With all the problems facing the United States and the various states that range from millions of Americans still lacking health insurance, and economy that continues to leave too many behind, to a crumbling infrastructure, there are many serious and legitimate reasons to call a special legislative session. In Republican controlled Texas, however, none of those issues matter. No, only a desire to wage a jihad against transgender students and citizens is the sole motivator for Texas Governor Greg Abbott. True, this is a topic that excites the Christofascists who disproportionately make up the GOP base in Texas and nationally. But it also says something about Abbott. Time and time over the years we have seen that it is Republican elected officials who have their own psycho-sexual issues who are obsessed with gays and transgender citizens and stamping on their rights, if not very existence. And remember: there are ZERO documented cases of sexual misbehavior by transgender individuals in restrooms. ZERO. The same cannot be said for Republican elected officials. Personally, I can only wonder at Abbott's what dark secret or mental illness motivates Abbott. The New York Times looks at the disturbing events in Texas. Here are excerpts:

Gov. Greg Abbott reignited one of the most divisive issues in Texas
politics on Tuesday, calling lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special
session of the Legislature in part to consider a bill that would reinforce the
state’s effort to regulate bathroom use by transgender people in public
buildings.

An attempt during the regular
session by conservative lawmakers and pastors to pass legislation to regulate
bathroom use had been unsuccessful by the time the session ended on Memorial
Day. But on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered a 30-day special session
starting in July and put on the agenda a bathroom bill that would prevent
municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances designed to protect
transgender people.

Opponents of bathroom restrictions, including moderate Republicans,
say such rules are discriminatory and would cause economic damage similar to
that in North Carolina last year after the state passed transgender bathroom
restrictions that spurred widespread boycotts and the cancellation of concerts
and sporting
events. Supporters say the restrictions protect public safety and privacy in
public buildings. They believe the predicted economic fallout has been
exaggerated.

“At a minimum, we need a law
that protects the privacy of our children in our public schools,” Mr. Abbott
told reporters at the Capitol in Austin.

Chuck
Smith, the chief executive of the gay rights group Equality Texas, said Mr. Abbott’s
decision would harm already vulnerable transgender people. “This is a 100
percent political issue, and the only reason for it is to target, demonize and
stigmatize transgender people,” Mr. Smith said.Because the Legislature failed to pass the bill during the regular
session, it effectively died; its only chance for survival had been a special
session, and only a governor has the authority to convene one.

In doing so, Mr. Abbott
ignored the concerns of local and national business leaders but earned swift
praise from social conservatives, some of whom had complained that he had
remained largely on the sidelines in the debate. Critics said Mr. Abbott, a
former judge who is viewed by many as more cautious than his predecessor, Rick
Perry, had capitulated to the extreme right, and to one of his Republican
colleagues, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who led the push for the restrictions.

[T]he
chief
executives of more than a dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple,
Microsoft and Facebook, warned Mr. Abbott in a letter that they were “gravely
concerned” that any bathroom-related legislation would hurt the state’s
business-friendly reputation. On Tuesday, the gay rights organization Glaad denounced the special session.
Democrats criticized the governor for jeopardizing the state’s
business-oriented brand.“My
take is that he is clearly panicked about the far right, and he feels the need
to shovel as much red meat to the far right of his party as he can,” said State
Representative Chris Turner, a Democrat. . . .[The bill] would
effectively ban local regulation of discrimination. The bill would prohibit
cities, counties and school districts from passing anti-discrimination measures
to protect any class of people already protected under state law. And it would
nullify existing policies in San Antonio, Dallas and other cities that allow
transgender people to use the public bathroom that matches
their gender identity.

Note how Republicans, the supposed champions of local control will not allow localities to make their own decisions, at least not any that challenge the bigotry and embrace of ignorance of their Christofascist supporters. If this bill passes, Texas will be added to the list of places that the husband and I will avoid - even for connecting air flights.

The rats will likely be speeding up their evacuation of the S.S. Trump, in light of a new breaking news story from the Washington Post which reports that Donald Trump asked Daniel Coats, Director of National Intelligence, to pressure then FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into Trump BFF Michael Flynn. Stated another way, Coats shared this information with his associates and will likely find himself as another witness, willingly or not, as to Trump's obstruction of justice efforts. Meanwhile, Yahoo News reports as follows:

Top lawyers with at least
four major law firms rebuffed White House overtures to represent President
Trump in the Russia investigations: Brendan Sullivan of Williams &
Connolly; Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Paul Clement and Mark Filip
of Kirkland & Ellis; and Robert Giuffra of Sullivan & Cromwell.
. . . .“The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one
lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions
between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the
firms themselves.

It would seem that we are thus rapidly approaching a reprise of Watergate. The sole question is whether or not Congressional Republicans will put the nation first and act as Watergate era Republicans did, or instead tacitly subvert the law and the Constitution. Here are highlights from the Post breaking news story:

The nation’s top
intelligence official told associates in March that President Trump asked him
if he could intervene with then-FBI Director James B. Comey to get the bureau
to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its
Russia probe, according to officials.

On March 22, less than a week after being confirmed by the Senate,
Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats attended a briefing at the White
House together with officials from several government agencies. As the briefing
was wrapping up, Trump asked everyone to leave the room except for Coats and
CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

The president then started complaining about the FBI investigation and
Comey’s handling of it, said officials familiar with the account Coats gave to
associates. Two days earlier,Comey had confirmedin a congressional hearing that the
bureau was probing whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia during the
2016 race.

After
the encounter, Coats discussed the conversation with other officials and
decided that intervening with Comey as Trump had suggested would be
inappropriate, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to
discuss sensitive internal matters.

The
events involving Coats show the president went further than just asking
intelligence officials to deny publicly the existence of any evidence showing
collusion during the 2016 election, as The Washington Postreported in
May. The interaction with Coats indicates that Trump aimed to enlist top
officials to have Comey curtail the bureau’s probe.

Coats will
testify on Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Lawmakers on the
panel said they would press him for information about his interactions with the
president regarding the FBI investigation.

The question of whether the president obstructed the Russia investigation
is expected to take center stage this week with Comey’s highly anticipated
testimony on the Hill on Thursday. Comey associates say that before the
director was fired in May, the president had asked him to drop the investigation
into Flynn, and Comey refused.

In an appearance
last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Coats refused to provide
details about his interactions with Trump.

But he indicated that he would cooperate with the Russia probe now being
led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Under questioning by Sen. Martin
Heinrich (D-N.M.), Coats said that if asked, he would provide details of his
conversations with Trump to Mueller.

Coats also said that if he is called before an investigative committee,
such as the Senate Intelligence Committee, “I certainly will provide them with
what I know and what I don’t know.” He said the Trump administration had not
directed the ODNI to withhold information from members of Congress conducting
oversight.

Let's hope the steamroller is about to run over Der Trumpenführer and, if we are lucky, many others in the Trump/Pence regime.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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